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December 2012

December 31, 2012

Thinking of a clever name for an alcoholic Shirley Temple isn't easy. Shirley Tempest, Shirley Temptress, Dirty Shirley, Shirley Temple of Doom - they're all taken, and most of the recipes are for vodka, Sprite, and grenadine. Thanks, but no. Well, I have a different recipe. The typical Shirley Temple is ginger ale and grenadine, but I wanted to use PAMA pomegranate liqueur and booze is up a little more. Instead of typical non-alcoholic ginger beer, I wanted to use real ginger beer. Everything on the US market that I know about is non-alcoholic except the newish Crabbie's, which is... Read more →

December 28, 2012

I went to Capo's in San Francisco's North Beach to try out the cocktails. The initial cocktail menu was quite a bit longer, but they edited it to be shorter and more whiskey-centric. There are currently just five cocktails on the menu: The Chicago Cocktail, the Silencer (Americano variation), Suicide (with white rye, creme de violette, maraschino liqueur), Wise Guy (rye, orange marmalade, lemon, oregano,) and a barrel-aged Vieux Carre' variation called the Made Man with bourbon, unaged brandy, sweet vermouth, and Benedictine. One wouldn't go so far as to say The Silencer is a molecular cocktail, but it does... Read more →

December 27, 2012

I've been attempting to do something interesting with pomegranate seeds as part of this Pomegranate Project I'm working on. But it hasn't been going well so far. My default ways to mess with an ingredient are: 1. Freeze it. 2. Dehydrate it. So I tried that, both with PAMA and with pomegrate seeds. Failures with Pomegranate But first, a success! I was able to easily remove pomegranate seeds from a fresh pomegranate by using the method in the video in this post. I split a pomegranate in two and whacked it with a muddler: out popped the seeds. Some pomegranate... Read more →

December 26, 2012

By looking over the camper_clips tag on Alcademics for 2012, I picked out a few of my favorite stories (on other websites) that I wrote over that last year. They are below. East Bay Sees a Cocktail Renaissance in the San Francisco Chronicle Liquid Smoke in the LA Times Magazine 50 Things to Drink in San Francisco Before you Die in 7x7 Magazine Is Carbonated Liqueur the new Cristal? on Details.com Summer Whisky Cocktails in Whisky Advocate (full story not online) Ironic Blue Cocktails on Details.com Carbonated Cocktails in the San Francisco Chronicle The world's 50 Best Bars 2012 in... Read more →

December 21, 2012

In my latest piece for Details.com, I round up some eggnogs that look weird enough to be interesting, including aged eggnog, smoky eggnog, one that sounds like you'd eat it at brunch, a super boozy one, and one made with two kinds of mushroom. Ones that didn't make the cut (yet sound delicious) are Ian Cargill's Carbonated Eggnog from Vessel in Seattle, and Cynar Eggnog from The Passenger in Washington, DC. Check out the story on Details.com. Read more →

December 20, 2012

Here is a hot drink that will both warm up your body and make your mouth tingle with added spiciness from black pepper and Tabasco. I tried a lot of versions of this drink before settling on the below recipe. My first thought was to skip the water and use regular wine rather than vermouth, letting the mulling spices work their magic on it. However that didn't work for me, possibly because I bought a really terrible bottle of red wine. I also went back and forth on using ground spices versus whole, but found there was just too much... Read more →

We all know that grenadine is supposed to be a syrup made of pomegranate juice and sugar, often with orange flower water added in. But most commercial grenadines are little more than red food coloring and sweetener. We might think that artificially-flavored cocktail ingredients like grenadine all came to be in the post-war 1940s and 50s, or in the disco-drink 1970s, but it turns out that grenadine has been an artificially flavored syrup for over 100 years. As we read in a previous post, pomegranates were brought to California by the Spanish in the late 1700s, and grown commercially before... Read more →

Camper English is a cocktails and spirits writer for publications including Saveur (Contributing Drinks Editor), Details.com (Cocktail Columnist), Whisky Advocate, PopSci.com, Drinks International, and many more. Learn about Camper and Alcademics, or read clips of his published work.